ASTRONOMY

The Siebel Center network will support advanced research applications and "ubiquitous networking" in which students and researchers have reliable, "anytime-anywhere" access to information. The new facility will house 1,800 students, educators and researchers and accommodate the current expansion of UIUC's Computer Science Department, which is renowned for the contributions its students and alumni have made in advancing technology, from providing the inspiration for "HAL" in 2001: A Space Odyssey via the ILLIAC IV, to the invention of groundbreaking computing applications such as the first Internet graphics browser. "We designed the Siebel Center to be most technologically advanced, collaborative computer science research facility at any University in the world-it will be a living laboratory for prototyping systems and technologies that will shape the future. To achieve these ambitious goals we needed an extremely flexible, scalable and reliable network infrastructure," said Chuck Thompson, manager of systems services for Computer Science. "UIUC is home to some of the world's brightest and best computing minds. To support their advanced research, we demanded a high performance network with sophisticated management capabilities. Foundry offered the most attractive price/performance and the best solution to fulfill our requirements." The Siebel Center will support a seamless network of thousands of multimedia appliances and provide Gigabit to the desktop connections for hundreds of network nodes. It will feature advanced network security and manageability functions, including Foundry's hardware-based network monitoring feature, sFlow, which provides wire-speed, 24x7 network management and monitoring without adding latency. All classrooms at the Siebel Center will be fully automated and equipped with digital audio/video capture, wireless networking, and future HDTV displays. Information technology infrastructure in the Center was designed in from the beginning, with embedded computers outside of offices and laboratories, streaming multimedia and tracking, all connected by wireless and high-speed wired networks for distributed collaboration and adaptation. The Siebel Center network will use Foundry's FastIron 1500 Layer 2/3 network switches from the wiring closet to the data center core to provide high speed switching capability and Foundry's ServerIron 800 Layer 4-7 switches to provide sophisticated network load balancing and security functions. The Siebel Center network designers particularly valued the Foundry solution for its wire-speed, non-blocking core switching capability, and Foundry's 802.1X port authentication features. "UIUC is the birthplace of some of the computing and networking industry's most innovative and disruptive ideas, and we are pleased to provide a high-performance Foundry network to support a new generation of researchers," said Ken Cheng, vice president of marketing at Foundry. "UIUC is exemplary of the world-class higher education organizations around the world that rely on Foundry networking infrastructure to support their teaching, research and communication applications."